How do we keep relationships alive when children come along?

A reall useful resource the the work I can do with children and families.

John, you are obviously doing exactly that. It is really tough on fathers because we are expected just to earn money, and if there is nothing to earn, then we feel we are failures - you say you are an embarrassment to your family. But your story shows that this is not true. You are there for your family. Your children are learning an incredibly valuable lesson from your horrible experience - that life can be really tough but we stick together anyway. If they ever meet such a situation in their lives (and so many of us do), they will look back on how you stuck together. Isn't that actually the most important lesson we can ever teach our children?

i am a father of four married and still together 26 years later, spent most of my working life as a sole trader builder/ bricklayer. From a selfish point of view the credit crunch stoped me in my tracks from being a succesfull rags to riches case, if the success of money had continued i would have had two sons holding on to my shirt tales, probably never happy trying to chase and be on an even keel with dads success, as dad had a heart atack due to the stress of possibly financial ruin and spent the next year doing nothing constructive the two boys are now learning to stand on there own two feet working for someone else, my daughter in beetween doing part time jobs and doing a good job with her limited finances whilst working hard on her a levels and planning her university future mostly on her own, in all i have to say the depression interveened before my idea of life would have possibly created a different kind of problem, THE, HOW DO YOU LIVE UP TO YOUR SUCCESSFULL PARENTS SCENARIO, WELL IT DIDNT COME TO THAT SO, i amm noww doing the exact same as the kids, creating a cv, fighting over the laptop to apply for non existant jobs,(believe me i have applied for jobs on a weekly basis for eighteen months without so much as an interview) this is one very bad financial dip, if it ends in the next three years i,ll say it could leave some possitives in regards to life experience , i can see some possitives in regarding my own family, although luckily my wider family helped me stay in my home so our situation could have been a lot worse, i mean , picture trying to do your a levels whilst in the process of being re,possessed, the reality is plenty poor kids are in this boat and i am good freinds with a victim of this, his wife who has just given birth has been admited to a phychiatric hospital and his older daughter is not coping at school, the embarasment of being branded a looser, the children embarassed in front of there freinds,this all leads to lack of confidence for everyone involved in a family down on there luck, unless you have the brains to allow this to wash over you and put it down to a temporary blip in the grand order of life, well there are days when trapped having your morgagr three quarters paid and you going deeper in debt lending money to pay the other quarter because the jobseekers allowance wont quite cover your gas or electric bills, you cant take a part time job or you will definitly loose your house when they stop your morgage help, you cant take a minimum wage job because this wont cover the morgage, so yes you are well and trully trapped, an embarasment to yourself and your family, you mix in less company because your predicament is not cool to discuss at a barbeque,(this is not an issue for us unless the kids leave some coal from there last barby)the reality is unless everyone from the collection end of things back off, there will be no correction, when are the goverment going to realise you cant get blood out of a stone.

i do so agree with Duncan. John, i think it's about time we acknowledged that men and fathers are far, far more than bread winners. We tend to airbrush men out of the picture when they do what children so value them doing - play with them, laugh with them, spend time with them. But that's the reality of what children really want from you. You talk of being an embarrassment to them, of being a loser - i don't think that's the words or concepts they use at all; that's all you, as a result of centuries of brainwashing into what it means to be a man and a father. Read my contribution to this debate "Is the recession all bad for children" and maybe ask your kids what they REALLY value in you. You, not your paypacket, is what they'll say. Your time. Your attention. And while i in no way wish to downplay the hurt and anxiety of the situation you're going through, it would help you to turn it round if you could see the benefits and the advantages of where you're at. Kids such as yours, two launched out into the world and the third about to be, often long to support and help parents who are going through rough time, the way they've been supported and helped in the past. If all we can think about is being a loser and an embarrassment we often miss that opportunity. It's a rough time, I so agree. It helps if we use the chance to make changes, in many different ways. New ways of looking at things, taking a different slant on what is there. As i said, dads - YOU - mean so much more to families than simply the ability to earn.

I think the greatest challenge that faces a couple wishing to stay together, is dealing with the stresses that a couple encounter such as money, back of with many families, dealing with the guilt of wanting more for your children, but education, social activiites have a cost and also keeping the fun in a relationship when the mudane routines of life take hold and your tired and low.
The best ways to work through theses challenges are making time for your relationship however hard it is, listening to each other, supporting each other rather than judging each other. Have you and me time, me time and time with children. Its getting the balance right which is the hardest thing when its easy to sacrifice your needs as a parent individually and as a couple for other issues that see of a higher priority. Parents only have so much time in a day and I personally find there is never enough time, with working and keeping house.
I think the biggest mistakes made by couples when faced with these challenges, is sacrificing our own time or time together for other priorities that seem more higher, having time on our own and together is the high priority, but in the routines of life, culture and society other pressures come first.
Yes I do think its possible to maintain passion and love over long periods of thime with the same person, but other pressures get in the way to cause problems on the couples path and its how they deal with them that dictates the path they take. Having knowledge, understanding, skills and tools to use to ensure time for each other and yourselves is underestimated and forgotten due to other pressing needs, situations, pressures etc.

good article in the Times today -http://tinyurl.com/ykp9roe - on fathers. it mirrors what i found a few years ago when i did a book for school use on teen pregnancy, and a magazine for One Parent Families on young Mums; that given the chance, the vast majority of dads desperately want to be involved and do their best for their kids. so many things militate against it - a macho culture, the fear felt by some women at losing their USP in being their child's main parent, in the case of young parents the hostility of the mothers parents and, as we heard today, a working culture that comes between dads asking for paternity leave for fear it spoils their prospects at work. as you say, Keren, we really need to tackle it now in proper SRE education. i sincerely believe things are changing at the coal face but we need to push so much more at the policy level to get opportunity for fathers to catch up with what many do want.

I fully agree that fathers need to be totally involved and having a baby should be a shared experience. I think we need to start earlier and include the role of a father in our PSE and sex education curriculum. This is often touched on briefly but there is little real discussion in the classroom and young people often find it difficult to express different views from their peers. They are the generation who can do it differently from their parents if they are given the opportunity to think this through early enough.

Rob, thanks so much for sharing your experience with us. Your initial situation--radical role division once the first child comes along--is all too common, and I know Duncan Fisher in particular, but all of us at KITM, are doing everything we can to change thinking about work'/life balance so that we start to talk about 'family leave' rather than 'paternity' or 'maternity' leave. After all, every family is different, and the freedom to to work out for yourselves how best to share the care of your children seems a natural right to me, and a true freedom and joy that we must work to establish.

It is of course important to hear about people who are doing the radical thing and changing the way that they organise their family lives. I wonder though how many working people are actually able to do that in ways that enable them to continue to pay the mortgage, rent, bills etc?

Perhaps you could open up the KITM debate by asking Deirdre to invite her readers to comment here, it will be interesting to see what a wider section of our society have to say about sharing roles and responsibilities and the reality of making it happen in their lives. Family leave is great for those in the right kind of work to support that but for men and women on mid to low incomes, its not that easy to take time off, reduce hours or leave work.

The 4children Family Commission, chaired by Esther Rantzen is currently hearing from an extremely wide spectrum of society and for many of those who respond the key issue is not how to share roles, but how to make ends meet in difficult times. I hope KITM will gather the wider perspective in the same way so that any policy recommendations are made from a well informed perspective.

Often parents drift into divided roles, because they tend to follow the cues all around them. From the moment a midwife talks to the mother-to-be rather than the couple, the roles begin to diverge, and there are very few nudges around to bring them back into a shared experience of having their first baby. I agree with Duncan - the leave system encourages you to sleep walk into a divided household.

That was our experience. Some years after our first child was born we suddenly realised that we had become locked into a male breadwinner/female carer system without ever having made a conscious choice. It just sort of happened. And we had become a rather unhappy couple as a result.

If couples were encouraged to think through their options for sharing work and caring at an early stage - definitely ante natal - they would have a chance to avoid this drift and have some control over their future roles.

In our case the solution had to be radical - I gave up work completely and became the full time carer for a year. That was a big enough change to shake up the building blocks of our relationship, and now we are working together to rearrange them in a way that suits us better, and enables both of us to be carers and breadwinners.

With 4 children under 5 we certainly found the early years as parents put a strain on our relationship, and as Duncan and Susan both mention - we began to live parrallel lives. What helped us through the challenge was going on a marriage course where we learnt about investing in 'us' as a couple and discovered that the quality of our relationship had an impact on our children. Some simple lessons in communication, managing conflict and deciding to make time for each other made all the difference.

...and in answer to Lindas question - it takes hard work and commitment but yes I do think its possible to maintain passion and love over long periods of time with the same person

i absolutely agree it's possible. i also agree it takes work and focus! we often don't learn how to do so from our own families of origin, or at school. we can do so by seeing someone, such as a counselor, who can help us acquire the skills. well done for doing so. it's so important that we get the message out, that it helps. it's one thing for agony aunts and counselors such as myself, Linda, Susan to bang on about it; it's so much more helpful to hear from people who have tried it and found it worked. thank you!

Susan Quilliam's comment highlights why we need to involve fathers from the very beginning in child care. When care is shared, open communication is more likely and therefore problems can be addressed earlier--leaving less opportunity for them to spiral out of control. KITM are dedicated to the 'ounce of prevention' approach, and in this area more than almost any other the wisdom of that way of working is evident.

As an agony aunt (for that's life and LBC97.3FM), the big issue that I get all the time is where Dad becomes (or feels he becomes) alienated after the first child is born. Mum gets utterly caught up in the new little one - and ends by unconsciously putting up barriers to Dad's involvement. Then a dynamic emerges where if he tries to help he is told how he is getting it wrong, if he tries to bond with the child that bond is challenged by Mum, if he retreats back into his work (in a parallel dynamic to the one Duncan describes) Mum complains. I am absolutely not putting the blame on Mum here - she is head over heels in love with her new baby and would give her life for the little one; but this loosens the previous love bond between her and her partner, often to the point where he feels utterly surplus to requirements. His confidence drops, he withdraws, Mum senses his withdrawal and puts even more commitment into her bond with her child; then the only way parents are relating is through the child which is not only unhealthy for everyone, but lays the ground for future breakup. Very, very toxic and sad.

There's a great deal we can learn from other countries--Scandanavia, as Duncan mentions, and Australia , for example. Of course, we'll want to create conditions that are uniquely suited to Britain, but we can learn a lot from those who are ahead of us. I agree with Duncan that a brilliant place to start is with the birth of a couple's first child.

The real biggie is how mothers and fathers end up leading different lives after a baby is born - far more different than most of them wanted. It kind of just happens, like a ton of bricks. "Who does the housework?" is the hottest topic in families. One parent - usually dad but mum if she earns more - gets squeezed more and more into work. The other parent gets squeezed more and more out of work. I think this is the biggest of all the causes of relationship stress in families with young children. The solution? Create a culture where both mothers and fathers feel able to take time off work after a baby is born without the fear of career death, so that they can share their whole lives with each other more. And that is exactly what we don't have. Look at the leave system. 2 weeks for dad and 52 weeks for mum - a real relationship cruncher. There are strong findings in Scandinavia that where parents both take time off work for children, their relationship is more stable.